Praise for Under the Influence: Musings on Poems and Paintings

* Oh, oh, my God,” my constant refrain to Kim Baker’s amazing poems, which I savored bite by delicious bite. What an honor to the artists Kim chose to render. I’d become an artist just to beg Kim to write me a poem!!~ Julie Hassett* Last night I finished reading ‘Under the Influence” and found it to be BRILLIANT! This is worth a second and third read if not more. HATS OFF TO YOU! ~ Carol Kogut* Kim Baker does more than reflect art in her ekphrastic poetry. She builds lines, she uses language that surprises: “There’s just no accounting for violence/or the way it charms you like a snake…” (Violence: Inspired by Jane Kenyon’s ‘Happiness’) and “If only they had a car/not wrecked when he looked away to adore her hair,/moonlight shading it the color of persimmons…” (After the Funeral with Edward Hopper’s Night Hawks, Oil on Canvas by Edward Hopper). Baker, playwright as well as poet, melds narrative and meditation in response to poetry and paintings and photographs like Seth Jacobson’s ‘Night’s Necklace’ which inspired Baker’s ‘Xanadu Dreams.’ (Last year, an excellent exhibit at Roger Williams University paired Baker’s ekphrastic poetry with Jacobson’s photographs.) ). ‘When Angel Comes: Inspired by ‘When Death Comes’ by Mary Oliver’ is one of the narrative meditations on angels: “I want to step on the hot lava full of unrestraint…/When Angel comes, I want to say: all my life was birth,…/I was the birth mother of music and verse and myself…” In this beautiful chapbook, Kim Baker brings new life to ekphrasis, an old technique, and brings us under the influence of her poetry.~ Nancy Brown* Kim Baker gives us the richness and intensity of twice-baked goods in this collection of poems. Her words work like bold brushstrokes, like allspice, like drums, to crisscross our senses. She has mastered the ekphrasis poem with its capacity to expand the vision of one artist through the vision of another, and we are richer for it. Baker takes us deep into what she reminds us is our one irreplaceable life.~ Barbara Schweitzer, author of 33 1/3: Soap Opera Sounds

* Kim Baker's Under the Influence is a lovely engagement on the part of a generous, openhearted, and smart poet with the art of others, both visual and poetic. "The blue daisies line my abundance," Baker writes, and I can only be glad for the bounty.~ Cathleen Calbert, author of Lessons in Space, Bad Judgement, and Sleeping with a Famous Poet

* The connoisseur of painting or photography who will "step off the cliff of decision" and buy and read Under the Influence will find in Kim M. Baker one who knows both how to look, and what to look for. She is a connoisseur of poetry - even, or especially - when it is enthralled by an artist's vision.~ Daniel Bosch, poet and poetry critic

It's Here!

Under the Influence: Musings on Poems and Paintings is available for purchase NOW at Finishing Line Press. See samples of poems in the book on the POETRY page, which includes several paintings that inspired and an audio version of one of the poems.Also, visit the WHAT'S NEXT page to read about Kim's upcoming readings in April 2014!